I used to keep a dream journal, a little book that I'd write my strange and crazy dreams in when I woke up (if and when I remembered them). Did you ever have a dream that you knew someone really well, but in real life you hardly knew them at all? I had one like that.
A new girl started working at Expo and I got paired with her to go around the store and check pricing. During this all day process, she told me all about her bizarre relationship with her boyfriend in more detail than necessary. So it wasn't that big a surprise when I had a dream about work, and in this dream, I knew her very well. It wasn't a romantic dream, just one where we knew each other as if old time friends. I almost didn't write it down at all, since I already knew where it came from. But I did. Then I got up and went to work like any other day.
When I got home, my ex was waiting for me. Apparently, she had made a habit of reading my dream journal or anything else I wrote when I was at work. (I would later find it wasn't just that, but my email and other things as well). She was furious, demanding to know why I was "dreaming about another woman".
I know this kind of scenario is usually used as a joke. Or reverse, when a woman has a dream her significant other is cheating and wakes up angry and starts arguing with him. But there was nothing humorous this time. She was threatening to call my job or to come up to my job and confront this girl (who, keep in mind, I barely knew). I tried to calm her down but she was insistent on arguing and we downward spiraled into the same old argument.
This time I made the mistake of trying to change her perspective. I told her, just because I hadn't planned on marrying her, didn't mean that I didn't love her or that it wasn't my willing choice. I told her I had been a naive boy searching for a stereotypical "diamond" but instead I had discovered a strange and new exotic jewel (her) and that the unexpected surprise was even better and more real to me. It was the best way I knew how to describe how I felt. She quieted down at that moment.
But forever after, whenever we argued, her new line would be, "I'm not your diamond, I'm just someone you settled for!"
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